Bass Lines

Song structure laid out and bass tracks laid down. Some guitar parts and a smattering of electric piano. Might as well reveal now that the March song will be a cover. Didn't really plan that but the arrangement was bouncing around in my head all through the last week of February so it seemed like a logical project to start with. It's an '80s synth pop song but without any synths. What I'm doing to it sounds like it's being played by a garage band. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's pretty raw sounding and I think I'm going to keep it that way.

I do want to say a couple words about Record. I haven't really spent a lot of time with the software since I got it in here last year so this week is the first time I've really tried to get any real work done in it. All I can say is... wow. I've been working away, recording, cropping, cutting, pasting, comping takes etc. and really haven't paid a whole lot of attention to how I'm doing it. I was just realizing that this morning. People have been berating Record for all the things it doesn't have or what it can't do. The lack of VST support, MIDI out, and no pitch shifting (yet) have been show stoppers for a lot of people and I can understand that if you really need those things. But I'm blown away by what it can do and how it does it so well. I don't normally wax so enthusiastic about music software; when I used to work in Sonar I spent as much time cursing and reading manuals as recording any music. That said I really liked Sonar because it was less of a pain in the ass than some other programs I'd tried. It could still be a chore though and I frequently found myself stuck figuring something out and losing the thread of what I was doing. But in Record I realized that I'm able to do what I'm doing without really having to put a lot of thought into getting the software to do it. That's a sign of terrific design. Now all this probably says as much about me as it does about the software. Some people really like to dig into the audio editing process, I just like to my fleeting ideas down before I lose them. I guess I'm the target demographic. Time will tell if I'm missing anything by sticking with a system that's missing the aforementioned features.I doubt it though, I never worried about them before :-)